


echoes (again)

by reflectionslie (fallsink)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Artists, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Multiple Deaths, Smuggler Ben Solo, Soulmates, Temporarily Unrequited Love, but doesn't go into detail
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-22
Updated: 2018-02-22
Packaged: 2019-03-22 11:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13762725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallsink/pseuds/reflectionslie
Summary: again and again, she slips from his grasp like moonlight(reincarnation au where ben seeks her through their past livesand maybe, just maybe this timethis time will be the last)[prev name: it goes round and round (everything falling)]





	echoes (again)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [politicalmamaduck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/politicalmamaduck/gifts), [rosewitches](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosewitches/gifts).



> unbeta'd, so I'll edit later  
> I sucked at history all thru middle/high school and college, so I'm sorry if there are historical inaccuracies!!  
> song title: bts - I need u

In his second life, he is a sculptor and she is his muse.

They meet when a patron comes to commission him and he is instantly mesmerized. This time, she is brunette and frail, softness stretched taut over skeleton limbs. But her eyes are openings of volcanoes, lava and molten rock, simmering heat beneath the surface of her hazel irises.

He doesn’t mean to cut the patron off – her _father_ , no less – when the senator describes his wishes, but he suggests that autumn colors would suit the ideas better, suit _her_ better. The older man takes it in stride, trusting his daughter’s image in the famous artist’s hands.

Beautiful models are the easiest to work with, but there is a strange familiarity in his movements as he presses, smudges, edges, molds the clay in her likeness. The weight of duty as well as personal passion to immortalize her.

He tries to delay his work, despite his reputation for artistic skill as well as efficient speed, trying to drag seconds into hours by changing her poses and costumes and expressions with no reason to do so.

Just to study her a little longer.

But although art is never finished, after a month, he could no longer deny that there is nothing else to be done.

Her father is pleased – _beyond_ happy – at his work, praising the bronze statue of her as his best piece yet and gives him a few extra gold pieces on top of their original deal. He accepts graciously, but doesn’t admit through his smile that he already knows it’s his magnum opus – the best he could ever hope, or dare to dream for.

Even then, it still doesn’t compare anywhere to her.

He tells no one about the other piece. The secret marble figure he keeps in his bedroom. The hidden masterpiece that he saves only for himself, and the only part of her he can keep. Her set and tinted eyes a pathetic reflection of her real ones, a mere flickering candle to the bonfire of her fiery stare.

When he takes his own life a few nights later, unable to bear his loss of her, he swears to the grave that if he ever finds her again, he’ll never, _ever_ let her go.

 

* * *

   
In his third life, he is a prisoner and she is a slave.

The colosseum is quaking with noise and the hundreds of spectators, drunk on expensive wines and bloodlust. Poor and rich, war-experienced and not, all manner of crazed eyes are fixed on him, down below. Beneath them in more ways than one.

He blinks up through his rusted visor towards the dazzling bronze sun, unfeeling in its brilliance. He only sees cruelty and hunger in the crowd’s and lion’s eyes. Both his enemies.

Except for her.

She is the only one who gazes to him with worry and fear, maybe a touch of pity. He doesn’t think any of those emotion suit her. Her slender figure hinted beneath servant robes as she pours generals their drinks, her bright eyes never leaving his.

But seeing her plagued in his stead does make something swell inside of him, hotter than the dusty heat, that anyone – _someone_ – cares for this nameless and doomed mortal among countless others in the gladiator pit.

The sweat makes his grip on his sword slip a little as he wonders if she will mourn him, and finds comfort in just that possibility.

He doesn’t defend himself when the lion roars before leaping upon him, letting his shield and weapon drop to the stadium floor. Choosing instead to memorize the way her pretty red lips parted in a silent scream, looking far less like blood and more like wine.

 

* * *

  

In his fourth life, he is a smuggler and she is a bride.

His mission could not have been clearer – smuggling the rare statue and bringing it to the pre-agreed place. He’s never questioned when the profit to risk ratio is so skewed in the former’s favor, yet he can’t help but wonder what can be so special about this piece for such a hefty reward.

It takes place during a wedding in the richest city in the world, so it should be no wonder that they’re ambushed just as he is delivering it to the new owner.

As he’s hoisting himself back onto the revving plane, cursing at the unforeseen trap, when he catches sight of unbound fiery hair and he twists around with one hand on the handle.

In the midst of the fight, she had lost the veil and strings a bow with shocking efficiency. When he looks upon her, he’s first struck by how familiar she is, then by the youth he is unused to, finally the striking similarity between her and the bronze statue.

They search each other with intent, weapons pointed at each other just the same. His finger is on the gun trigger, sweaty as it waits for his command. But he hesitates.

His hesitancy costs him everything.

The crude but well-aimed arrow buries itself in his back, tearing him apart from between his shoulder blades, and he falls with the glittering statue into the swallowing and pitiless darkness.

A cursed Icarus, daring for an instant to love the sun.

It is the only mission he’s ever failed, and she is the only treasure he’s ever let slip through his fingers.

 

* * *

 

In his fifth life, he is a soldier and she is a medic.

Recklessly is how he joins the military, barely a man, naive dreams and misdirected passions burning through his veins.

Before long, though, not even his disenchanted illusions of war-found glory are enough to sustain him as bitter days drag pitilessly into months, then somehow a year. The endless gunfire, the countless death toll, the dirt and dried blood clinging suffocatingly to his skin and uniform.

The world silences and stills when one night a dropped bomb goes off. Too close, far too close. For an instant, all he can see is her silhouetted smile against the full moon behind her like a halo before pain then darkness.

She fades in and out of his hazy grey fever dreams. Only her cool hand against his heated cheek tethers him to something as she changes his bloody bandages, soothing words far more comforting than even the medicine and warm porridge.

But he doesn’t last long enough to see the end of the war.

With his final breath, he dies with his long dark hair strewn across the white fabric of her lap, her arms wet with blood, sweat, and tears protectively around him, and their hands clasped over the stillness of his heart.

 

* * *

   
In his last life, he is a prince and she is a scavenger.  
  
They meet again and again across the scattered years – on battlefields, over their bond, through dreams. Chasing each other among crumbling planets, all-consuming space storms, and devastated stars.

Never too apart and always reaching far.

Now, they stand. Him a towering silhouette cornering her between him and the edge of the canyon, and her – despite losing her own saber – staring back so intensely that any lesser man would have faltered or given up. Given in to bow her before her feet.

He thinks of how she’s always been like this, how brightly she’s always burned. Searing like fireworks of explosive colors and branding herself into the backs of his eyelids until they’re just distant specks in unrecognizable formations.

So it’s fair that he’s been the one pursuing her.

He could have believed her heartless and unconnected to him, had it not for the bond. But even without it, he sees his own longing mirrored in her driftwood eyes, the hesitancy catching in her ribcage.

So he sheaths his scarlet blade now and drops it upon the dusty ground. Neither of them blink and she does not move as he steps carefully forward, closer and closer, until they are less than a breath away. He bends down, so close that it’s not invasive and she could move towards or away if she wanted to.

But she doesn't. Back when they had been this close the first time they fought, her bottom lip had trembled, her shoulders collapsing into her body. But now she just stares back, the tender desire unmistakeable, both white-hot and welcoming. That alone is enough for him to cross the final distance between them.

Her lips are a soft contrast to her sharp jawline, he finds. She pulls him in or he falls, but his strong arm soon curves around her slender waist, muscles against softness stretched over taut bones. The other hand gather at her cheeks as he swallows her gasp. She is so small and pale against him and the black leathery night around them, that his entire arm travels easily around her frame. He could just be the shadow of a waxing moon.

Even with all his darkness that devours everything in his way, he could never consume her or overpower her or defeat her.

Even if he had wanted to.

Somewhere between the sweeping heavens and the dry earth, they deepen the kiss and sigh into this sensation so akin to falling. As his tongue licks past her swelling lips and behind the backs of her teeth, all of their past lives flash through their minds.

They are the one and of the same. One spirit split into two bodies, neither better nor weaker than the other. The only true balance of whatever souls are made of. Always seeking, chasing, following the other, across decades and millennia uncountable.

This is bigger than this forsaken war, or their bond that outlasts their curse, or even the struggling battle back and forth between darkness and light.

This is far bigger than either of them, or what they could ever imagine.

Suddenly the earth itself is splitting apart, the entire foundation of planet breaking beneath their feet. They break apart as well to watch the edges of the desert world collapsing into light and darkness around them. But they never separate from each other.

Not now that they’ve finally, _finally_ found each other, across one, two, _five_ lifetimes and universes, and both know that the other will never let go.

Their eyes find each other through the rising grey smoke as their hands mirror as well in another palm-kiss.

And, sharing a brief smile, together they leap.  


 

 

* * *

 

 

 

(In his first life, he is a gorgeous boy with green eyes and golden locks, and she’s just as beautiful.

Loved by gods, mortals, and even the echo resonating through the mountains, he scorns their advances, believing them unworthy of his time and gaze.

He is cursed when he lies by the pool, mesmerized by the form in the watery depths. The creature smiles as he does, weeps when he wept, staring back with lovesick agony in equal measure. Every time he reaches to catch it all, she slips from his fingers like moonlight.

Again and again, always just out of his grasp, with only the moonlit waters joining them together.

At least they are together when they wither away, beauty fading from their skins until it’s only their eyes pouring fading passion into each other.

In his first life, he is a narcissus and she is his reflection.)

 

_round and round it goes_

_everything falling,_

_why it’s you, only god knows_

_why we’re forever calling_

_but it was always you,_

_and it’s always going to be you_

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the greek myth of narcissus and this beautiful comic/poem 25 Lives https://s2b2.livejournal.com/142934.html  
> I had originally written this for @politicalmamaduck, but someone got there before me, so I also wanted to dedicate to @rosewitches (which was the closest prompt to this), since no one should be left out ~!  
> not as happy with it, bc it changed a lot from what I originally planned, but hope you liked it!!


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